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Foes vandalize speed cameras, target program with initiatives
Category: Civil Rights · State: Arizona · Source: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2008/12/15/20081215camerahate15a1.html
When a man swung a pickax at the metal housing of a freeway speed camera, the clang resonated with untold numbers of Arizona drivers frustrated with the 3-month-old program.
It's hard to know if the cameras have more fans or foes. But, so far, the foes have been more vocal, filling up Internet discussion boards and talk-radio airwaves. These impassioned people want the cameras to come down - if not with a pickax, then with a vote.
Two groups say they are readying citizen ballot initiatives for the 2010 election that would cripple the cameras. Some folks aren't waiting. Besides the pickax, there have been vandals spraying Silly String or putting Post-it notes over the lenses.
Those against the cameras take varying angles: Some call them an invasion of privacy or just a way to soak drivers for money; others worry that cars suddenly slowing at photo zones will cause more accidents.
A few honest ones, though, will say they simply can't drive 55 mph.
"It's not as fun to go slow," said Jay Mann, 27, an aerospace technician from north Phoenix.
Mann does approve of red-light cameras at intersections because, he said, they improve safety. But freeway cameras, which trigger at 11 mph over in 55-mph zones and at 10 mph over in 65-mph and 75-mph zones, don't necessarily make people safer, he said.
"I feel I can drive my car . . . at 75 miles an hour and be safe," he said.
Darin Simmer, 40, a retired nightclub owner, said the sheer number of freeway cameras bothers him. "There's just one after the other after the other," he said.
Simmer, who recently became part of an online group at www.camera fraud.com, said the public has reached a breaking point.
"I think there's some blowback," Simmer said.
The cameras already pushed a former substitute teacher to the breaking point.
According to a court document, an officer parked under the Loop 101's 59th Avenue bridge at 11:42 p.m. Dec. 3 heard loud noises and turned around to see a man swinging a pickax up at a camera.
By the time the motorcycle officer approached, he saw the man scramble up the freeway embankment, the report said. He yelled at him to stop, and the man did, raising the pickax over his head.
The officer noted that the camera had six "puncture wounds" in its face. The company that makes the cameras said the device suffered only "cosmetic damage." However, the blows did knock the camera out of position, keeping it from recording violations, the report said.
Travis Monroe Townsend, 26, faces a felony charge of criminal damage in the incident. He was released on his own recognizance. His next court date is scheduled for Wednesday. Camera foes didn't expect a yard-tool assault, said D.T. Arneson, the Mesa computer repairman who started Camera Fraud in August. They were surprised that Townsend was hailed as a hero on radio stations and on chat boards.
The incident "could be used as a pulse for the general public," Arneson said.
That's a good sign for the group's proposed ballot measure, which would shut down the freeway speed cameras.
Another proposed ballot measure, offered by two Mesa businessmen, would allow the cameras to operate but have them snap only speeders going 20 mph over the posted limit.
Dane Platt, who runs DW Sports Group in Mesa, said he has filed initial paperwork with the Secretary of State's Office.
Redflex, a Scottsdale company contracted to operate the cameras for the Department of Public Safety, said it believes photo enforcement would survive a popular vote.
"We can't be led to believe that (the criticism) is the majority of citizens," said Shoba Vaitheeswaran, a Redflex spokeswoman.
Redflex has encountered a "vocal minority" in every city that has introduced the cameras but had not heard of an incident like the one in Glendale, Vaitheeswaran said.
"We welcome an honest debate based on the facts," she said. "Unfortunately, what we're contending with here is in another league."
Tom Fillers is ready for that debate, especially after he received his photo ticket. A camera snapped him on Nov. 11 supposedly going 66 mph in a 55-mph zone.
Fillers said he was heading south on Arizona 51 near Highland Avenue. Traffic was light, and Fillers said he didn't pay attention to his speed. He was just going with the flow of traffic.
"Now, you've got to know what the speed limit is in the area you're in," he said. "Instead of being focused on driving, I'm focused on where these doggone cameras are."
Lt. Jim Warner, a spokesman for the DPS, said it's true that a driver like Fillers who was "going with the flow" might not have been cited by an actual officer waiting for a real speed demon.
"I understand that," Warner said. "But does that make it right?"
Warner said the DPS may look at raising trigger points for the cameras as it evaluates the program. He said the department is worried about safety, not money. He said he understands why the public is upset. The cameras can cite many more people than an officer ever could, so it seems unduly harsh.
"I guess we all got spoiled," he said. "We didn't have any checks and balances because there weren't many officers out there."
Warner said people tell him they like the speed cameras, although he said that, sometimes, he is in his DPS uniform when he hears positive comments.
The cameras do have a fan in Gabriella Arroyo, 31. "It will stop a lot of speeders," she said. "I find myself going the speed limit now. If it's affecting me, it's affecting a lot of other people, too."
Arizona Ballot Could Become Lottery Ticket
Category: Arizona · State: Arizona · Source:
To anyone who ever said, “I wouldn’t vote for that bum for a million bucks,” Arizona may be calling your bluff.
A proposal to award $1 million in every general election to one lucky resident, chosen by lottery, simply for voting — no matter for whom — has qualified for the November ballot.
Mark Osterloh, a political gadfly who is behind the initiative, the Arizona Voter Reward Act, is promoting it with the slogan, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Vote!” He collected 185,902 signatures of registered voters, far more than the 122,612 required, and last week the secretary of state certified the measure for the ballot this fall.
If the general election in 2004 is a guide, when more than 2 million people voted, the 1-in-2-million odds of winning the election lottery would be far better than the Powerball jackpot (currently about 1 in 146,107,962) but not nearly as great as dying from a lightning strike (1 in 55,928).
“People buy a lot of lottery tickets now,” Mr. Osterloh said, “and the odds of winning this are much, much higher.” (And most of the time there is not much lightning in Arizona.)
If some see the erosion of democracy in putting voting on the same plane as a scratch-and-win game — and some do — Mr. Osterloh sees the gimmick as the linchpin to improve voter turnout and get more people interested in politics.
In 2004, the year of a heated presidential election, 77 percent of registered voters cast ballots in Arizona, but in 2002 — the year Mr. Osterloh, a Democrat, ran for governor in what might politely be called a dark-horse campaign — it was 56 percent. Primary election turnouts are much lower.
About 60 percent of the voting-age population is registered, though that includes people who are ineligible to vote, like illegal immigrants and felons.
“Basically our government is elected by a small minority of citizens,” said Mr. Osterloh, 53, a semiretired ophthalmologist who has helped write and campaign for various successful ballot initiatives.
Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate in Washington, said the idea of a voter lottery had come up in other states, but he could not recall any moving forward with it. And he’s glad.
“People should not go vote because they might win a lottery,” Mr. Gans said. “We need to rekindle the religion of civic duty, and that is a hard job, but we should not make voting crassly commercial.”
Editorial writers, bloggers and others have panned the idea as bribery and say it may draw people simply trying to cash in without studying candidates or issues.
“Bribing people to vote is a superficial approach that will have no beneficial outcome to the process, except to make some people feel good that the turnout numbers are higher,” said an editorial in The Yuma Sun. “But higher numbers do not necessarily mean a better outcome.”
The initiative calls for financing the award through unclaimed state lottery prize money, private donations and, if need be, state money. A spokeswoman for the Arizona Lottery Commission said its unclaimed prize pot fluctuated greatly, but it now stood at more than $1 million.
Mr. Osterloh said private donors could add their own incentives, like a car dealership offering a new car to a random voter.
But he may be getting ahead of himself. There is the not-so-small matter of whether such a voter lottery is legal.
Passage of the initiative would supersede a state law barring any exchange of a vote for money, legal experts agreed, but whether it would get around similar federal laws was a matter of debate.
One federal statute calls for fines or imprisonment of up to one year to anyone who “makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote.”
“It’s clearly illegal,” said Jack Chin, a professor at the University of Arizona law school who has studied voting rights issues.
“This is cute and clever, but even though it responds to a real problem, it does so in a way that threatens to degrade the process,” Mr. Chin said.
But Mr. Osterloh, who has a law degree, and the lawyer who helped write the initiative, Anthony B. Ching, a former state solicitor general, said the laws were meant to stop individuals from buying or selling votes for particular candidates or parties. In this case, it would be a state-sanctioned program with a high purpose and, they add, offering the chance to win — voters opt into the program — was not the same as giving everybody money to vote.
“I don’t think the federal law would cover this kind of situation,” Mr. Ching said.
State political leaders so far are keeping their distance.
Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat who will also be on the November ballot as a candidate for reelection, has declined to take a position. The leaders of the State Senate and House, both Republicans, did not answer messages seeking comment.
But Mr. Osterloh presses on. He predicted the idea would spread to the two dozen states that allow citizen ballot initiatives if it was successful here.
The local chapter of We Are America, a group seeking to register Latinos to vote after large pro-immigration demonstrations last spring, plans to promote the initiative in its voter education and registration drives.
“We’ve certainly tried everything else, and people don’t seem to turn out,” said Roberto Reveles, president of the group.
And some voters are giving it serious thought.
“I’m pretty up on the issues, so I don’t need it,” said Beverly Winn, a grocery store clerk here. “But who wouldn’t take money if they offer it?”
High court explains decision that doomed TIME
Category: Initiative and Referendum · State: Arizona · Source: Arizona Capitol Times
The Arizona Supreme Court released its explanation of an earlier decision credited with dooming the 2008 TIME transportation ballot initiative and called on legislators to revamp initiative laws to ease the pre-election workloads of officials.
The TIME measure, which was expected to raise $42.6 billion over 30 years to address the state’s infrastructure needs, was dealt a mortal blow in August when the high court upheld a trial court’s decision that supporters of the measure had waited too long to challenge the actions of Secretary of State Jan Brewer.
Brewer had rejected TIME petition sheets containing a variety of errors, and the measure was disqualified. Defending herself from the lawsuit, Brewer cited state law that imposes a 10-day deadline to challenge the rejection of petition sheets. The sheets, claimed TIME officials, were improperly rejected and cost the committee thousands of signatures needed to qualify for the November ballot.
Attorneys representing TIME supporters argued on two fronts: First, that the earlier court decision was erroneous; and, second, that a state law allowing judges to command officials to carry out their duties could have forced Brewer to re-examine disqualified petition sheets.
The TIME committee has claimed, essentially, that Brewer overzealously disqualified petition sheets containing thousands of signatures. TIME attorneys then proceeded to argue that the state’s 10-day deadline to appeal a secretary’s refusal to accept petitions was unworkable because subsequent signature-verification processes by counties are allowed to proceed for up to 15 days before a secretary will certify or decertify a ballot proposition.
In the Nov. 18 opinion, the high court sided with the ruling of Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Mark Aceto, and disagreed with TIME attorneys on both fronts.
A ruling in favor of the latter argument would have left citizens with no avenue to seek a court ruling on a secretary of state’s disqualification of petition sheets and signatures, wrote Justice Andrew Hurwitz, in a unanimous opinion.
The Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling earned an unusual rebuke from Gov. Janet Napolitano, a chief supporter of the TIME initiative.
“I can respect the Supreme Court and just say they’re dead wrong and it’s a shallow opinion,” she said. “I thought it was wrong and wrongly decided on a whole host of areas.”
Cari Gerchick, Supreme Court spokeswoman, said the “opinion speaks for itself.”
The high court also suggested that lawmakers re-examine existing ballot-initiative laws to help state and county election officials manage increasingly high workloads during election years and to broaden the time period for legal challenges.
The court noted that, even without litigation, county election officials have acknowledged an inability to comply with laws requiring verification of all signatures for ballot measures in the event committees are found to have filed less than the required number of valid signatures.
“Our election officials are required to process large numbers of initiative and referendum petitions,” Hurwitz wrote. “The growth of the state’s electorate means that the number of signature submitted in order to qualify for placement on the ballot has also steadily grown. And, even when the secretary and county recorders complete the verification process within the statutory deadlines, the time for judicial review has been shortened by the needs to prepare ballots for early voting.”
TIME attorney Paul Eckstein found comfort in the fact the justices recognized the growing problems with the initiative process, and said he felt the measure’s absence from the ballot could have been a “blessing in disguise” as many propositions were defeated at the polls in November.
“God knows if it would have passed,” said Eckstein, adding that voters likely would have rejected any tax increase with an economic recession looming. “This was a rough election year.”
The call for initiative reform was well-received by Maricopa County Elections Director Karen Osborne.
Faced with “monstrous amounts” of signatures for verification and an unusually high amount of invalid signatures this year, Osborne said reform could come by creating an earlier signature-filing deadline or a possible lowering of the amount of signatures necessary for review.
Osborne suggested moving the deadline to March or April from early July to allow more time for review. Current law requiring the complete verification of 5 percent of a committee’s filed signatures could also be reviewed, she said.
“The court is right,” said Osborne. “We desperately need to reform that.”
Opinion: Denogean: Ballot query on initiatives was a bad joke for Arizona
Category: Initiative and Referendum · State: Arizona · Source:
The voters of Arizona resoundingly rejected on Tuesday a ballot proposition that would have gutted the initiative process.
Proposition 105, Majority Rules - Let the People Decide, was a bad joke, a measure that would have counted nonvoters on many resident-driven initiatives as "no" votes. Passage of the measure would have made it almost impossible to pass any future initiative that involves government spending.
That said, problems with the initiative process have rightly led some to consider whether it's in need of reform. The process has "gotten out of control," in the words of one liberal legislator who never thought he'd say such a thing.
State Rep. Tom Prezelski, D-Tucson, said the state's founders, having had experience with a corrupt territorial Legislature, put the residents-initiative process into the state constitution to give Arizonans a way around the Legislature. It was and is a valuable tool.
Irony 101: Az ballot measure would limit ballot measures
Category: Initiative and Referendum · State: Arizona · Source: Tuscon Citizen
Proponents of a ballot measure to restrict ballot measures call it a financial necessity. Opponents say it would deliver a near-crippling blow to a form of direct democracy that Arizona has used since it became a state.
Proposition 105 on the Nov. 4 ballot would make it so that no initiatives that raise taxes or require new spending could take effect unless they're approved by a majority of all registered voters.
That presents a much higher hurdle than the current requirement that an initiative get approval from a majority of voters actually casting ballots. And it's one that legislative analysts say no Arizona initiative in the last decade would have cleared.
A national expert on initiatives and referendums said the Arizona measure would cut down the approval rate and probably even discourage some activists from even launching initiative campaigns in the first place.
"Voters get fewer choices," said John Matsusaka, a University of Southern California law professor of business and law.
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